Cascades of grace from suspended meals

Ann Morisy's argument - that the rich and comfortable need to journey out and encounter struggle - is very helpful when applied to the suspended meal scheme we run in our church coffee shop. One one level, this is simply a charitable endeavour whereby hungry people are fed. We are meeting a need, perhaps not in our immediate area, but in the Borough of Southend: a pressing need for the basic necessities of life among our homeless community. Morisy argues strongly that churches should not look at these projects simply as 'needs meeting' - there is something more profound going on.

If we as a church see the suspended meal scheme as only a way of providing food to those who need it, then we will seek to do so as efficiently as possible. Our current scheme could been seen as highly inefficient: hungry people need to travel to us to get the food; we are in an affluent area where costs are high; donating the suspended meal money to a homeless charity which already exists would seem to be a much more efficient use of the money. The suspended meal scheme has always been about more than that, however. Giving money is easy; having a meal alongside someone who is homeless is perhaps not quite so easy. It's perhaps a little awkward and embarrassing. Going further - maybe getting to know the person who lives a very different kind of life from your own - is harder still. How do I make conversation? What if I say something stupid? We don't have anything in common. Our coffee shop staff are naturals at making our homeless customers feel welcome, and genuine friendships are developing.

One interesting observation one of our managers made was that people tend to give more to suspended meals if they are in the coffee shop when one of our homeless customers is there. A customer will sidle up to the counter and ask discreetly, "Can I please pay for their meal?" 'The homeless' is no longer an alien group of people but someone I can see before me, eating the same kind of meal I am eating. The vague knowledge that there are people out there who are struggling has now become immediate and real. And there is something wonderful about acknowledging our shared humanity - our shared need for shelter, company and food - as we eat together in the same place.

It's not very efficient. It does meet many needs, however, and not just the obvious ones.

Comments

Making the best of a bad situation

This morning, instead of going to church, I put this note through all the houses on our street. Despite being an extrovert, I have a tendency toward social anxiety. Despite being an evangelist, I really hate door knocking. As I approached each door, I noticed lots of “no junk mail” stickers and felt briefly worried. One sticker said “no unaddressed mail”. Putting notes through the doors of people I’d never met - even though we live within a few dozen metres of each other - felt risky. Even worse - some people were outside their houses. I actually had to talk to them! “Don’t worry, I won’t come too close,” was my opening gambit. As someone who suffered from OCD as a young adult, fear of contaminating others is quite a familiar sensation. We Brits have the reputation of being standoffish and maybe a bit antisocial, and the virus is not helping in this regard. And yet, I live in the commuter belt; many of us on our street go off to London on trains every morning and come home late

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties. This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks. The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids). I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday. The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children. I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too. I decided to carve a simple fish and c

Do not fear

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash When I was 15 years old there was a particularly unpleasant murder which was splashed all over the news. The culprits were identified, given long prison sentences and, many years later, new identities upon their release. I remember watching news footage of the defendants being brought to trial in a prison van, angry crowds screaming abuse as it drove past. My mother's perspective on this was interesting. "We all have darkness inside us," she explained. "It's easier to scream at it in someone else than to face our own." Today is All Hallows' Eve: for the past week, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts have loomed at us out of shop windows, from supermarket shelves and strung up as decorations outside homes. Tonight it reaches its peak as many of us, adults and children, dress up in the things we most fear. Axe murderers, which come to mind whenever we're alone in the house and hear a creak on the stai

Coffee Theology

Search This Blog